


The Naming of Parts

by kerlin



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:38:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You must never forget that, suddenly, in an engagement,/You may find yourself alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Naming of Parts

Sara bites her nails.

It's not much of a revelation, as revelations go, but once it's made, Nick can't stop staring.

Her hands have always been one of the most beautiful parts of her, and he thinks that perhaps they were the first part he started watching. Fluid, graceful arcs transcribed in the air, patterns traced from evidence to evidence until she steps back and nods in smiling satisfaction, because she's just painted the Big Picture.

But they're still now - or mostly still, but at any rate they're as still as Sara's hands ever get - resting splayed on the eggshell plastic of the break room table. The webbing between fingers is stretched slightly and that's his only clue that there is tension in those hands, because he tries mimicking her placement and finds he can't without actively keeping his muscles engaged.

Almost his only clue - the other is in the fuzzed edge of her left thumbnail and he has a suddenly vivid mental picture of the tip of her thumb between her lips, rucking the nail against her front teeth in a nervous gesture.

There's just the slightest hint of white star on the same nail, possibly from the pressure of her bottom teeth as she bit down particularly hard.

He read once that nail-biting was an outer display of masochism. That's not a word he ever thought to apply to Sara. He runs down a mental list, tries to fit "masochism" in between "longing" and "masked" and no, it doesn't quite fit.

Grissom calls her name and she looks up, and they're working a DB fished out of one of the hotel fountains together. Nick's on a break-in solo and then joining Catherine and Warrick on their boutique hold-up.

Sara curls her fingers in quickly, and he misses his view of her fingers immediately. Now the only thing he can see are her fists, clenched tightly, and the not-quite-one-emotion smile she is wearing as she looks at Grissom.

Maybe it does fit, after all.

*

Grissom's eyes aren't quite ocean-blue, but she's sure women have told him they are anyway.

No, they're just a little too light to be ocean blue. Not that one can quantify these things; everyone's rods and cones offer up a different judgement on the same reality. She doubts that when a poet said ocean blue he had in mind a specific square foot of ocean at a specific moment in time, though that's what it would take to get a good handle on the color.

Sara's rods and cones were trained on the Pacific in early morning - August 27, 1987, to be exact, at 5:43 AM. Sunrise after a storm, with the water a bit more gray than it usually was, and just the faintest hint of whitecap on the inrolling waves as they rushed up to caress her feet. It was the moment she realized that whoever had said you can't go home again was right.

Now she is thinking about revising that, because Grissom's eyes are just about that exact color.

She'd left that beach and walked up to the house, and every step had taken her further away from the child-Sara and her naive ambitions, and further under cover of darkness. Across the country to Boston, to a dark back alleyway in Cambridge, and then to the wood-paneled conference room when she'd first seen the ocean blue of her leave-taking watching her from Grissom's eyes.

Sara came back to the Pacific to find that it wasn't home anymore, to confirm what she'd already known for certain by staring hard at the waters of San Francisco Bay. She'd been watching a gathering storm collect in over the bay from the window of her overpriced oceanview apartment when the call had come, and she'd left behind her ocean without a second thought.

But steps traced to the Las Vegas desert brought her right back to the carefully watching not-quite-ocean-blue gaze, and every time she looked in Grissom's eyes she was once again poised and balanced on the edge of that August morning.

*

Catherine's hair is spun gold.

Grissom can't think that without reflecting back on Rapunzel's Faustian bargain and wincing at the cliché, but he also can't escape the thought as he watches her under the desert sun. Her sunglasses are black against pale skin, and her hair is lifted and teased by the gritty wind.

He thinks that there's a certain irony in comparing Catherine to Rapunzel, because he's quite sure she would have throttled Rumpelstiltsken to within an inch of his life rather than set off on a fool's quest to try save her firstborn. On second thought, Catherine would never have made the bargain in the first place; she would have told the king precisely what he could do with his room full of straw and left without a backward glance.

Porcelain skin and pale gold hair, and steel underneath. She walks like he imagined she danced, claiming her ground with every step, and she stands now with her hands on her hips and curls her lip in disgust. Grissom can practically see her composing the tongue-lashing that the quivering young deputy in front of her knows is coming.

And then she lets loose, and Grissom has to hide his small secret smile as he crosses his arms. She speaks in a low, deadly voice and doesn't move a muscle, but her hair is out of her conscious control and it dances and sparked wildly, catching and discarding sunlight.

Catherine would laugh if she knew he thought that, and she would be embarassed - a rare state for her - if she knew he thought she was the bravest person in his acquaintance. She breaks ground with an easy, brazen physicality; she lives her life as if she is still on that slick, glitter-spattered stage.

And yet, there is still the touch of a fairy tale in the gossamer wisps that lash against her cheek as she turns to face him.

*

Warrick's shoulders aren't quite broad enough or strong enough for the weight of the world, but no man's should be.

There is a reasuring solidity to the curve of muscle and bone, and Catherine has discovered she likes to curve her hand around the expanse. A feather-light touch, reaching up to ground herself; he smiles slantingly at her, a quick twist of lips. She returns it and takes her hand away but keeps the sense of comfort with her.

She has watched those shoulders hunched over a piano, flexing and twisting. He didn't know she was watching - and watching she was, almost more than listening - and that day was her first glimpse into the poet's soul that lived behind the eyes she had once called his best feature. Catherine would have to be blind not to realize what a beautiful man her co-worker was, but that moment wasn't about sex for her; it was about humanity, and she has treasured it.

She has watched his shoulders slumped in grief, and then she has watched them roll and square again in a slow evolution of growing confidence. The first time she saw him do that, she realized why it was Warrick, more so than any of the rest of them, that was Grissom's heir apparent.

It is in the way that, over time, those shoulders are more and more solid in a way that has nothing to do with bulky physical strength. His sense of self is growing in leaps and bounds in a brilliant forward trajectory that she can only marvel at; it is at the same time a mirror, and vastly different, from her own journey from one side of the tracks to the other. He has faced challenges she can only wonder at, and he rises to meet each one with a quiet, easy grace that makes her own desperate scrabbling look frenzied and inelegant.

He knows better than to assume he could carry the world's ills in a burden on his back, but he would try anyway.

*

Nick has an All-American chin.

It's a football chin, Warrick thinks every time he looks at his friend. A quarterbacker chin that was made to snug under a helmet, the kind of square, solid feature that middle-class America adores.

Warrick grew up on what Nick's family would have called the wrong side of the tracks. The casino was his football field, and when Nick was suiting up and running out a tunnel, Warrick was running bets and using his fake ID to belly up to the blackjack table to earn enough money for dinner that night.

It would never even have occured to Nick to count cards. He probably hadn't even known what it was before he came to work at Las Vegas. Dependable Nick Stokes, who never got the third degree from his dates' fathers because they knew exactly what kind of man he was. Nick would never have left Holly at that crime scene.

Perhaps it is a reflection of growing up as that golden boy, and perhaps it is some inborn quality, but Nick is the best man Warrick knows. Part of him, the part that still knows how to spot an easy mark at fifty paces, will never quite understand how they came to be friends.

He sometimes feels that his feet are set on an ever-shifting emotional quicksand, and that try as he might, he has only to tip his head a certain way to hear the siren call of cards shuffling and flapping against a green felt table. There is a mercurial quality to his life that means he will never quite grasp anything firmly.

It is some level of insanity that has him staring at Nick's chin this morning and thinking of the day he lashed out and accused his friend of not knowing him. For just a second, he had wanted to escape back into that midnight world of parking garage meetings and earpieces, where thousands of dollars were won and lost with a heady surreality. But that wasn't who he was anymore - Nick had known that, had, without judging, without questioning, held up the mirror and waited.

And so here they are, the boy who used to star in the games and the boy who used to bet on them, and there is a smile spreading across Nick's face above his squared chin.  



End file.
